May 25, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
23:39
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I've been up against some of the most hardcore people out there, as you know. | ||
| The best thing you can do is give somebody a dose of reality and don't expect them to change right away. | ||
| I've been to a Bernie Sanders rally and had a discussion with a college student during his last presidential run. | ||
| And by the time I was finished with the conversation, she said, you know what, the math doesn't add up. | ||
| I said, "Good, go figure it out for yourself." | ||
|
unidentified
|
♪♪ I'm David Webb, and welcome to Dave Rubin's Book Club. | |
| Something I thought I would never say in all our years of knowing each other. | ||
| Chapter 7, Stop Hating Straight White Men, America, and Western Values. | ||
| And my guest today, the one and only Dave Rubin. | ||
| Or am I your guest? | ||
| We're each other's guests, Webb. | ||
| We are changing the internet by being civil to each other, even though people want us to hate each other. | ||
| How about that, huh? | ||
| Well, they're gonna fail miserably, my friend. | ||
| And as people should now know, we've been friends a long time. | ||
| And we are aligned, but it's after 5 o'clock where I am, so I'm toasting you with a Macallan 18. | ||
| Congrats on the book. | ||
| I will drink to it and never burn it. | ||
| Right on, brother. | ||
| Well, I can only do water right now because I got a bunch more interviews later, but... | ||
| There we go. | ||
| So I want to say that you were the perfect guy for this chapter. | ||
| We tried to select people that obviously it made sense for each one. | ||
| But this idea of stop hating straight white men, America and Western values, when you and I met, everyone that's read the book already knows the story. | ||
| I was a lefty. | ||
| You were on the right. | ||
| We met in the hall of Sirius XM. | ||
| We struck a conversation. | ||
| You said, hey, why don't you come on to my show? | ||
| We'll debate some stuff. | ||
| We began doing that. | ||
| We did it pretty frequently. | ||
| We'd go out for drinks after, go out for dinner, and there was no need to hate anyone. | ||
| But David Webb, I'm a simple man. | ||
| Explain to me how it is that you don't hate straight white men. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| That's what I'm told you're supposed to do. | ||
| David Webb, how is it? | ||
| I'll keep it really simple. | ||
| Hate takes too much work. | ||
| Alright, I know that's kind of a cliche and people get that. | ||
| But why am I going to spend time trying to find a way to hate a guy I meet in a hallway on another channel which I'm not supposed to agree with? | ||
| That's a lot of effort. | ||
| How about Hey, your name's Dave. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| I'm a David. | ||
| Let's not get each other confused. | ||
| And let's just talk about things that matter. | ||
| That's really how we met. | ||
| I wanted to talk to someone who didn't share my particular point of view. | ||
| You were willing to have that conversation. | ||
| And here we are many years later, good friends. | ||
| And we're actually two of the people and I'm going to give a lot of credit to you because you took a bold step. | ||
| You've taken several bold steps, Dave. | ||
| People need to understand you stepped out. | ||
| And you spoke for freedom. | ||
| You spoke for rationale. | ||
| You spoke for getting out of an age of unreason and going to an age of reason. | ||
| We've got to get beyond this and into deeper conversations. | ||
| And that's what we need to do, not just for America, but for the world, because we set the tone. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm glad you brought up America there, because I know that we are both deeply proud to be Americans. | ||
| And that is something that, for some reason, the left, which used to be proud to be American, seems to now take deep shame in that. | ||
| And it's like, what brings us together, for whatever our immutable differences are, Who cares as an American? | ||
| And yet those ideas seem to have taken root in a really perverse way. | ||
| Yeah, it is perverse. | ||
| And think about what they've tried to do to you when you're out and you're speaking, the cancel culture. | ||
| We're going to shut Dave Rubin down. | ||
| Well, first of all, you and I remember someone that most people I hope will get more familiar with if you don't know him, Andrew Breitbart. | ||
| Andrew said, more voices, not less. | ||
| Americans have said that throughout our history, even in our most Visceral, maybe vitriolic disagreements. | ||
| But today it's cancelled. | ||
| Today you don't get an opportunity. | ||
| You actually don't get an opportunity to disagree today. | ||
| And that's something fundamentally anti-American. | ||
| It's what other people look at us from around the world and say, I want to be there because I can do that. | ||
| My friends, my family overseas, they love the fact that Americans can argue with each other, come up with 21 different, or maybe more, opinions on something, and still realize that we're Americans. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about, I mentioned three wake-up points in the book, and one of them is about you, and I was at the Young Turks, and we're watching a clip, and there's David Webb, and they didn't know I was friends with you, and they're calling you an Uncle Tom, and a sellout, and a self-hating black man, and all of those things. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the slings and arrows that you've taken because you're pro-American, because you believe in the Constitution, because you believe in freedom? | ||
| I always tell people when they say, I hate the phrase black conservative. | ||
| You're a conservative, you happen to be black, big damn whoop. | ||
| I mean, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not that it has nothing to do with your identity, but you are a man first, a human first. | ||
| But can you talk a little bit about just That it's just because you're sort of pro-America that they feel that they can use your identity against you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, the first thing, Dave, is... I'm sorry, not your identity, your immutable identity. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, the skin color is obvious, right? | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| Anybody walking down the street can see your skin color, my skin color. | ||
| Therefore, it really doesn't matter. | ||
| What they can see is what's in our minds and in our hearts. | ||
| I've had these values since my teen years, and I developed more along with the learning and education that comes with growing a little bit older and learning more things. | ||
| I'm a Republican. | ||
| You know, I'm someone who's proud of the Constitution, proud of the country and our culture. | ||
| And that's why I am who I am, because I'm proud of it. | ||
| So I don't hate myself. | ||
| You know what, Dave? | ||
| I love myself way too much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's nothing wrong with that. | |
| Yeah, it's just a crazy situation when you just say, hey, here I am, here's what I believe, I love my country, and they want to come for you for that. | ||
| I love my country so much, and I rarely talk about this, but at 17 years old, I began a process of applying to the Naval Academy. | ||
| I was decided on colleges. | ||
| And yes, because of my family history, which goes back to the Revolution. | ||
| I'm actually a son of the American Revolution. | ||
| I'm the great, great grandson of a man who led a revolution in Jamaica, a slave rebellion. | ||
| I grew up with that pride. | ||
| I knew who I was. | ||
| So I raised my right hand. | ||
| I served only a short time. | ||
| I went to school. | ||
| I make no bones about that. | ||
| But I wanted to show my love for the country because of what I wanted to do also for myself. | ||
| Which is very much a part of what we do in America. | ||
| You can serve the country, you can serve yourself, you can serve your community. | ||
| It's not just about military, it's about just being a good human being. | ||
| And we've lost that too much, but I'll tell you, I'm gonna shock people. | ||
| I disagree with the overarching narrative by the cacophony of, frankly, overrated voices who say that America's bad, millennials are bad, boomers are bad, all of this is bad. | ||
| Come on, you and I travel the country. | ||
| There are so many good people in this country. | ||
| I've been in the Deep South. | ||
| I've been in rooms with racists. | ||
| I've interviewed a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| I've been to Vidor, Texas. | ||
| I've been to so many parts of this country, and I've seen black, white, every other dynamic play out, politically, culturally, you name it. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'm still here. | ||
| Because there are more good people in Tupelo than they would tell you in some parts of the media. | ||
| You got some tricks on how we can get people out of this mindset? | ||
| Because the reason I titled the chapter like this, Stop Hating Straight White Men, Stop Hating America, is that it seems like it's just like this easy thing to catch when you're a young person. | ||
| You live in this privileged place, which I believe is the only privilege there is in America, is American privilege. | ||
| It's pretty freaking spectacular. | ||
| But they seem like they're very easy ideas to catch. | ||
| that make you feel morally good or something like that. | ||
| What kind of success have you had, you know, deconverting people from that? | ||
| Because it ain't easy. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And I'll tell you, I've been up against some of the most hardcore people out there, as you know. | ||
| The best thing you can do is give somebody a dose of reality and don't expect them to change right away. | ||
| I've been to a Bernie Sanders rally and had a discussion with a college student during his last presidential run. | ||
| And by the time I was finished with the conversation, she said, you know what? | ||
| The math doesn't add up. | ||
| I said, good, go figure it out for yourself. | ||
| I don't try to convert people. | ||
| I talk to them. | ||
| I asked them what's important to them. | ||
| And I think if you engage people by saying what's important to you, in other words, we're going down a highway. | ||
| There's 2 cars. | ||
| We're in different lanes. | ||
| We're going down a highway. | ||
| There's a destination at the end, but we have different lanes and different approaches to get into that same destination. | ||
| So does mine make sense? | ||
| Does yours make sense? | ||
| And if we can figure out that somewhere in between these two lanes is a middle lane where we can have the discussion, then maybe we can understand more about what really matters rather than focusing on our individual choices. | ||
| And look, I've changed my mind on things. | ||
| My eyes have been opened. | ||
| There are smarter people than me out there. | ||
| So I don't try to tell somebody I'm smarter. | ||
| I just ask them to look. | ||
| Look at the issue for what it is. | ||
| Look in the mirror and be honest with themselves. | ||
| It's what my father taught me. | ||
| He said, if you can look in the mirror, if you can talk to yourself and say, I'm confident, I can back up my facts, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Last part. | ||
| If somebody brings you a better set of facts, then son, you've gotta adjust your position. | ||
| One of the things I've been getting asked a lot while I'm on this book tour is why is it that people on the right, say conservatives, libertarians, old school liberals, seem much more open to the debate and the discussion than people on the left? | ||
| I have my own theories. | ||
| I want to hear yours, but before I let you jump in on that, one of the things that I've noticed is every time I do your show, when you throw it to the callers, almost every single caller says the same exact thing, which is, hey, they'll be saying it to either one of us. | ||
| They'll say, Dave or David or both of you guys, I don't agree with you on everything, but I'm happy you're having this conversation. | ||
| Do you think there is an actual philosophical or psychological reason that people on the right seem to be better at that right now than people on the left? | ||
| Yeah, I think there is. | ||
| And the way I've put it for years is the liberal brain versus the conservative brain, not Republican versus Democrat. | ||
| This, unfortunately, has changed, and I'm going to change it now for the very first time. | ||
| It's no longer liberal brain versus conservative brain. | ||
| It's leftist brain versus conservative brain, because liberal ideas are not bad ideas. | ||
| We have differences. | ||
| You know who you're talking to, my friend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, the liberal idea of Learning more, expanding your horizons, caring, is no different than the conservative idea. | ||
| The problem is leftists have inserted themselves, the anti-American, anti-freedom crowd, and frankly they're cowards. | ||
| They're flat out cowards because they won't engage in a debate of ideas with somebody who disagrees with them back to the cancel culture. | ||
| If Dave Rubin decides to step out and say, I'm a gay man. | ||
| I'm a gay married man. | ||
| And by the way, we joked about this on late night TV. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, David, if you had to be gay for a day, who would you be gay with? | |
| Dave Rubin. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| He's got a sense of humor. | ||
| Hold it. | ||
| Black Republicans aren't supposed to have a sense of humor. | ||
| These are people who are fearful and hate themselves. | ||
| I'm still shocked Comedy Central let us do that. | ||
| But the thing is, they took the chance, looking for the failure. | ||
| What did you and I do? | ||
| We proved that we could sit there with others, have a reasonable discussion about our agreements, disagreements, and differences. | ||
| And when it came time, we found out we could actually laugh together. | ||
| And you know, maybe it's an old school phrase, but laughter is the best medicine. | ||
| You can laugh at yourself, laugh at things, and along the way you'll find that you have more in common. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make about the middle part of this, which is that it's, okay, we say straight white men, Western values, but I think the part that I didn't put in the title that I think is the underlying of all of this is sort of just the endless attack on Christians. | ||
| That we see that it's just like, that's like just allowed. | ||
| And I'm not, look, you, I think you should be able to basically say whatever you want and all that stuff that, you know, my feelings on free speech, but just sort of like the mainstream, like if you mock Christians, you are applauded for it. | ||
| While if you were to mock any other group, you would be lauded. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I, I gotta say that that one troubles me and there are, you know, there are times when I look at it and I go, what is your goal? | ||
| Are you going trying to shut down this group because they're Christian? | ||
| Are you trying to shut down somebody because they don't care the same way you do? | ||
| Well, the idea of freedom is that, you know, I don't have to agree with you, Dave. | ||
| You don't have to agree with me. | ||
| But we have to respect each other's rights. | ||
| And this is where you and I align so perfectly on the Constitution. | ||
| Individual rights are not crowdthink or groupthink. | ||
| Individual rights are our rights. | ||
| We do have limitations on how you express your right. | ||
| We allowed Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. | ||
| But at the same time, we don't allow you to go in and inflame the situation, you know, the shout fire in a crowded theater approach. | ||
| So we've got to walk a careful line, but I'm not afraid. | ||
| And unfortunately, too many Americans are afraid of the disagreement. | ||
| So they come out and they take it on to let's attack Christians. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You know, turn the other cheek. | ||
| Christians are meek. | ||
| But the same cowards won't go out and attack Muslims. | ||
| They won't go out and attack another religion. | ||
| But they'll pick on Christians and Jews and maybe Buddhists and others who won't come back because they don't fear it. | ||
| Well, you shouldn't need to fear it to have a discussion about it. | ||
| It's a level of cowardice that we need to erase in this country. | ||
| Are you hopeful that we can reset some of this stuff? | ||
| I mean, people always ask me if I'm an optimist or a pessimist, and I always say, well, I'm a world-weary optimist because I consider myself a realist first. | ||
| But I don't think I could wake up and write a book and do everything that I do if I didn't believe that what we do can fix some of this stuff, can restore pride in America, an understanding of freedom and liberty, and all of those things. | ||
| I suspect you're ballparking in the same spot as me on that, right? | ||
| I'm not only the eternal optimist, and look, we all face challenges. | ||
| There are times when I'm sitting alone or I'm thinking about something, and it gets me down. | ||
| It does. | ||
| You know, I'm human. | ||
| I sit there and I look at it and I go, how the hell do I change this person's mind or these corporate people to think? | ||
| Or at least maybe not change their mind, but get them to think outside themselves. | ||
| And as soon as I go there, I remember basic lessons. | ||
| This country, this culture, this Western value system, is founded on laws that are set in place to protect all men and women, to protect societies. | ||
| And yeah, our constitution is different than the British, than the Australian, than other countries that are in the Western hemisphere of the globe. | ||
| But for the most part, we value the chance to be who you are, the chance to debate someone, the chance for freedom. | ||
| And that's when I remember the basic rules. | ||
| The basic rules are we've got more in common in this life. | ||
| And if I don't like someone or disagree with someone, and I'm not pretending that there aren't really bad people out there who need to be off and out of the conversation. | ||
| But if I vehemently disagree with you, I still think fundamentally, we have the right to live together and exist together in a society like ours. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| That debate actually excites me. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, I'm out of that dark place. | ||
| And I'm out of that moment when I'm so worried. | ||
| That I become more hopeful and I'm more hopeful because of guys like you, like me. | ||
| We have a responsibility. | ||
| We have a megaphone. | ||
| We have a microphone. | ||
| We have a camera. | ||
| We have what we're doing here. | ||
| And if we exercise that responsibility more and more, then there's other people that will join in with us because we are more than them and we're going to win this. | ||
| Web, I know we should probably end it there because it was so perfect, but I want to bring up one other moment with you because it went viral and I know that most of my audience has heard it before, but it's worth repeating again because it actually captures the essence of this chapter more than anything else. | ||
| Can you explain what happened in your radio experience with Areva Martin, who is a progressive, who I actually had on The Rubin Report way back when, many years ago. | ||
| She's a perfectly nice lady from my experiences with her. | ||
| But you were on the radio with her, and something interesting happened, and it gets to the exact purpose of why I titled this chapter this. | ||
| Smart woman, Ivy League education lawyer, analyst for CNN. | ||
| Their team reached out and wanted to come on the show to talk about the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, now Justice Kavanaugh. | ||
| We have the discussion. | ||
| In short, they picked me. | ||
| I didn't pick them. | ||
| But because the discussion went to something which parroted or mirrored what's supposed to be the, you know, the white male Dynamic white male conservative dynamic without any hesitation. | ||
| It was so easy for her to say to me, David, because you're a white male, you have white privilege. | ||
| Now, think about that for anybody watching this for a second. | ||
| I'm going to guess, you know, they're not white cheeks and maybe we got way high. | ||
| We got the contracts up way high. | ||
| What she did was so easy and so sad in a way. | ||
| She not only couldn't do the research, couldn't tackle me on the basis of ideas. | ||
| Me saying I didn't believe that my color of skin was my primary driver to | ||
| shorten it up, but that she also had to go further and throw her team under the bus. | ||
| So there's a fundamental dishonesty about her. | ||
| She may be a nice lady. | ||
| I'm not going to judge her personal character. | ||
| I'm not going to attack her, but she's an ill-informed and in many ways, a willfully ignorant person. | ||
| who is bound to a description that has been fed to her or that she has absorbed into her person | ||
| and becomes someone who judges by a broad stroke and a false construct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's actually fascinating. Yeah. | |
| Well, it's so fascinating because obviously it was radio, not video. | ||
| So she assumes that you're white by your thoughts. | ||
| Then when you say she threw her team under the bus, her response when you said, well, I happen to be a black man, her response was, oh, my people gave me the wrong information. | ||
| As if, as if any of us, when we go on a show, they hand us a thing and it's like, are you talking to a white guy? | ||
| He's 34. | ||
| You know, he's heterosexual, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But the reason I wanted you to mention that again is it's such a perfect encapsulation of the whole chapter because her implication was your thoughts had to be the thoughts of white men, thus they were wrong. | ||
| And then the second you confront her on the truth, she then throws her own people under the bus as opposed to rethinking her thoughts. | ||
| And if I'm not mistaken, you did invite her to chat after that, but nothing came of it. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| No, I invited her back. | ||
| Anthony and Edwin, my producers, reached out. | ||
| We emailed her team. | ||
| She said on the show at that time I would come back because I would give her the microphone. | ||
| I would give her an hour. | ||
| I wanted her to come in studio so we could have a reasonable discussion on this. | ||
| But you know, I've been dealing with this my whole life and I've watched it get worse. | ||
| So let's go back to the subtitle of your book. | ||
| And by the way, I borrowed the subtitle to write in one of my articles. | ||
| Thinking for yourself in an age of unreason. | ||
| I've watched an evolution of the wrong voices getting a big platform in college, my young years, the decades since to where we are now. | ||
| These are people who should not have a public forum. | ||
| Not because I want to shut them down, but they don't deserve one. | ||
| They haven't earned it. | ||
| And the fact that all my life people have told me, you shouldn't be. | ||
| My question is always, tell me Why I shouldn't be. | ||
| I didn't see in the books where black people had to be Democrats, or on the left, and white people, especially old white people, had to be Republicans, Evangelicals, and on the right. | ||
| I saw a part where this country has a flag that we pledge our allegiance to, that we raise our right hands for those who serve in the military, but that we all across this country stand up and respect as a way that says, you know, this has a representation, the field of blue, The stars, the blood that was shed so that we have the opportunity to disagree with each other. | ||
| This is who we are. | ||
| Human beings disagree. | ||
| They talk, they argue, sports, religion, any topic. | ||
| You and I have debated so many of them, but we never walk away going, I need to take you out of it. | ||
| And I need to take you out. | ||
| I need to demean you and attack you. | ||
| And my audience loves you for that reason. | ||
| They love because they don't actually see the difference between us. | ||
| They see more similar things between David and Dave. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter, my friend. | ||
| Webb, you're the best. | ||
| I appreciate you doing this. | ||
| And I look forward to some whiskey in real life. | ||
| One of these days, I suppose. | ||
| Just for you, Dave. | ||
| At our late night chats. | ||
| Many of them. | ||
| The McAllen 18. | ||
| Here's to you, my friend. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| You don't need it, because you're so good at it. | ||
| And to you, to family, and to your dog, don't burn the show. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
Export Selection